Three Coins for Confession (34 page)

Tell them who you are…

The words came like a whisper in Chriani’s mind, pressed in close
and echoing. A male voice speaking the Ilvalantar, each complex syllable
ringing out clearly. He forced his hand down where it shot up by instinct to
scribe the moonsign over his heart.

You know what this is, Chriani of Ilmar and Halobrelia. You
know where to see me, but be wary. Others are watching.

Chriani turned slowly as if assessing the crowd, voices rising
and falling around him. Their words faded for him, though, his perception
shutting down. Closed in and focused on the sensation of having another mind in
his. A sensation he had felt before.

His gaze passed over Veassen but didn’t linger. He saw the blind
seer nod.

Someone was shouting. Dargana’s voice at his ear repeated it, but
Chriani heard it only as fragments of sound. The tall warrior in grey-green
leather again. “…folly to even attempt…”

He clenched his fist to stop it trembling. The steel ring at his
finger was tingling, but whether the sensation was real or just the panic of
his mind, the seer understood.

Yes,
he said.
The ring.
The voice was strong in
Chriani’s head, even as it carried a weight of age and understanding that gave
it a hollow quality.
I have no relic to match it, but I can make use of your
ring’s magic. In my lifetime, I have learned and forgotten more spells than are
known among all the Ilmari. Trust me, Chriani.

I have problems with being asked to trust people I don’t know,
Chriani thought. He was speaking the Ilvalantar in his mind, but it came
easier to him somehow than it did as speech. Some power in the link between
them that let him focus his thoughts.

There is no time for the explanation you deserve, Chriani. But
know this. I am the one who sought out Dargana and bade her seek you. I am the
one who saw you pursued by the Ilvani of Calalerean, as I saw you standing here
today. We are connected in your being here. And in what must happen here today.

Even over the scant few times he had used the steel ring with
Lauresa, Chriani had quickly learned how difficult it was to focus his
thoughts, keep them from turning to words that could be heard at the other end
of the link. He found that focus now, though, because the seer’s words in his
mind had summoned up a single thought in reaction, and it wasn’t one Chriani
would share.

Kathlan was gone.

His whole life, he had willfully — often
gleefully — distanced himself from everyone around him. The street
children he had lived among after his mother and grandfather died, before
chance and Barien’s kindness had taken him to the Bastion and a new life. His
peers among the tyros from the day he’d been granted his insignia. His
superiors among the squires and guards, the captains and lieutenants of the
prince’s guard. Lauresa, the two of them drawn together and driven apart, not
once but twice.

Chriani had driven himself even from Barien when the darkness
that shrouded his mind became too much sometimes to hold back, and even as
Barien had known the reasons why. Only Kathlan had ever been truly absolute in
his mind, his heart. Three short years, during which Chriani understood only
now how much he had hoped that his mind and heart had changed.

Only Kathlan had ever been set above his instinct to push
everyone and everything away, given enough time. And now he had managed even
that, and his life was done.

“…feed into the Ilvalachna’s plots to dominate all the Ilmar…”

He still heard Dargana’s whisper, but Chriani didn’t need her
translation anymore. The seer in his mind had sharpened his ear for the tongues
of the Ilvani somehow, granting him insight even into the fast-spoken words
passing back and forth across the chamber floor. The green-armored warrior was
shouting down Farenna now. She was taller even than the rider was, lean like a
wolf, her golden hair beneath its circlet woven as a screen of braids. She
slapped the hilt of a backsword at her belt to punctuate her words, other
Ilvani scattered through the crowd striking right hand to left shoulder in time
with her. Some kind of show of support.

If all this was your plan, then your plans were finished
before they began,
Chriani said darkly.
Now get out of my head.

He was already pulling the steel ring from his finger when the
seer spoke.

Chriani, I know what happened on the Clearwater Way.

He let the ring stay where it was. Something in the voice, in the
way it slipped through his mind, created a sense of calm that spoke to the
truth of the statement. Chriani wondered suddenly if it would even be possible
to lie through the link the rings created.

Not a tough claim to make for things Dargana could have told
you,
he said in his mind.

The exile spoke no word of these matters,
the Seer said.
Nor
would she, as you who know her true character would understand.

Then you read it through my thoughts…

No, Chriani. I saw it before it happened. Your pursuit of your
princess. The assassin of Uissa slain as you flew in the Ghostwood, the narneth
móir in your hand. I saw you claim that blade from beneath stone where it was
hidden. My magic might read the thoughts of your mind in the moment, but memory
is hidden even beyond the reach of spellcraft. Tell me the last time you
thought directly of these things?

A silence fell. The brown-robed Ilvani who had spoken first,
Laedda, had command of the chamber again.

“This council renders its judgement,” he called out. A sense of
endings, of lost opportunity and anger, was in his voice. “Chriani of the Ilmar
will be returned to his homeland, and will carry with him this doom of the
Valnirata. That having seen this one of the hidden cities, his life is owed to
us. Should he ever again set foot in the Muiraìden, that life shall be
forfeit…”

Tell them of what Dargana told you, Chriani. There is little
time.

“I would speak,” Chriani called.

Laedda’s voice and Dargana’s echo cut off in abrupt astonishment.
From the speaker’s indignation, Chriani might have guessed that he’d never been
interrupted before.

“I am Chriani of the Ilmar and House Halobrelia,” he said again.
He spoke the Ilvalantar carefully, but felt it come easily to his mind. The ring
was warm upon his finger. “I am the envoy chosen by Chanist, who you name the
Ilvalachna, but who has trusted me…” Though his voice remained clear, Chriani’s
thoughts of Chanist distracted him. He felt his tongue seize up. “I will carry
your intent back to him.”

And try to avoid getting shot on sight or hanged for treason
while I’m at it,
he thought. He could sense the words made real in the
seer’s mind.

You must call yourself one of fate’s chosen,
Veassen said
in response,
and bonded to the Ilvani and Ilmari realms.

Are you mad or simply drunk?

Quickly, Chriani. Tell them of what you did on the Clearwater
Way. The story as it is known. The war that would have begun if not for you.

“The trust of your prince carries no weight here,” Laedda said
evenly. Chriani waited for Dargana to translate, not sure what might happen if
the sudden upturn in his fluency was noticed.

“Then trust me for what I’ve done,” he said finally. “I am one of
fate’s chosen, and bonded to the realms of Ilvani and Ilmari alike.” Chriani
felt himself flush as he said the words, but the Ilvani were strangely rapt as
they watched him. “I fought the assassins of Uissa and rescued the princess of
Brandishear on the Clearwater Way.”

Not the biggest lie he had ever told. Certainly not the worst. As
a matter of instinct, though, Chriani understood that the stakes of his lying
had never been higher.

“I stopped Uissa’s plot to blame the Valnirata for the murder of
an Ilmari royal heir, and to incite war to east and west that would have seen
the Greatwood burn.”

You have done well, Chriani. Now tell them the last.

“I know the Calalerean Ilvani seek the heir of the exile’s
blade.”

He shouted the words, hadn’t meant to. No idea where the defiance
that filled him had come from. He heard the silence that hung in the aftermath,
turning to take in the assembled crowd. His gaze passed over the seer as he
went. Veassen was standing expressionless, no sign that he had even heard what
was said.

Among the other Ilvani, something had changed.

“This gathering of elders ends,” Laedda said. “A council of
masters meets the rising of the pale moon.”

No one argued. No one spoke in response. Chriani saw a restless
anger in the gaze of the tall warrior with golden braids as she turned from
him, but the seething emotion that had filled all the platform space just
moments before was gone as quickly as it had come. The Ilvani turned to file
out along the tiers of the dais again. Chriani stood where he was because he
had no idea what else to do.

He glanced to the side once to see Dargana watching him. She
looked relieved as she nodded. It was an unfamiliar expression on the exile.

The blind seer was gone. Chriani hadn’t seen him leave. His mind
was clear, no sense of any voice there but his own.

Farenna lingered to the end, approaching Chriani and Dargana as
the last Ilvani filed out.

“You will follow me, friend Chriani,” he said. “Accommodations
will be made for your rest. As a guest.” He smiled, but Chriani was too weary
to return it. A chill twisted through him as he and Dargana followed Farenna to
the stairs. Pieces of the puzzle slotting into place.

The seer had sought him out and bade him speak to whatever
council this was. He had told them things Veassen already knew, but which the
other Ilvani clearly didn’t. Chriani’s thoughts were scattered, fighting their
way through two levels of shadow.

The games princes play,
he thought. The Ilvani had very
different ideas of power and leadership, he knew, but some things stayed the
same.

He had no idea what he had gotten caught up in. No idea how he
was meant to get out.

He remembered the seer’s voice in his mind. Remembered how his
own voice had shouted out in the end.

The Calalerean Ilvani seek the heir of the exile’s blade…

He had said it, but even now, Chriani had no idea where it came
from. Veassen’s voice had been in his head, but he couldn’t remember those
words spoken by the blind seer. Only in his own mind.

It must have been an echo. The seer thinking, Chriani speaking,
as one. It had happened that way sometimes with Lauresa in his mind.

Why couldn’t he remember it, then?

Outside the council hall, Farenna led Chriani and Dargana to a
wide bridge that arced away and up from the great platform, twisting through a
screen of branches into unknown heights above.

“Follow,” the warrior said, stepping onto what looked like a path
of thin wooden dowels suspended in empty air. The corded ropes they were strung
along were so thin they could barely be seen, the bridge shifting with
Farenna’s movement as he stepped on. There was no railing, Chriani saw as he
followed carefully.

The nobles and captains who had filled the hall had already
scattered, but the platforms around the bridge were thronged even more thickly
now with the other Ilvani of the forest-home. All of them were watching Chriani
as he and Dargana followed Farenna up and into shadow.

THE LOFT WAS SCREENED by curving walls of white cloth,
wrapping a broad platform whose ceiling was successive layers of the endless
canopy of the Greatwood above. It had the look of guest quarters, with water
and mead, flatbread and some sort of cheese set on a low table. Blankets and
cloth cushions were scattered about, no other furnishings to be seen. Chriani
had no idea how high above the ground they were, but as he lay back now on a
rough bed of cushions, grass-stuffed by their feel and their scent of meadow
hay, he could feel the platform shifting gently with the wind, could see the
haze of sunlight bright through the leaves.

In the aftermath of the gathering of elders, Farenna had led him
and Dargana along two more gently swaying rope bridges to a twisting ladder
lashed to a tall limni’s split trunk. “To the top,” he said, indicating that
they should climb. Chriani felt a dizziness take him as he swung onto the
loose-hanging ladder, forced himself to focus as he clambered up carefully,
rung by rung. At the top of a high series of platforms stacked like so many
shelves, he and Dargana emerged through the hole in the center of the loft’s
floor. Farenna didn’t follow them.

Dargana had prowled the platform for a short while, staring into
the leaves above as if to make sure they weren’t being watched or guarded.
Chriani was too weary to do anything but sit, pulling a cushion under him as he
felt along the edges of the cloth walls. Though they were tied tightly, he
wasn’t sure he trusted their strength, shifting away so there was no chance of
leaning back against them. A raised dais set off behind screens revealed a
washbasin and a low commode, but the loft had no place specifically to sleep.
The Ilvani had no such need.

“Are you all right?” Dargana brought bread and two flasks of mead
from the table, then sat across from Chriani. When he simply ate in silence,
the exile shrugged and drained one flask on her own. Then she moved to the far
side of the platform to sit cross-legged, closing her eyes.

Chriani was more tired than he thought possible. His mind was a
storm of shadow, his back and legs and shoulders aching in previously
unimagined ways. He gathered cushions in an attempt to make some sort of
makeshift pallet, but succeeded only in scattering them when he lay down. He
settled in the end for laying two blankets folded on the smooth wood of the
floor, then wrapping another around him. He set cushions beneath his head and
legs, trying to quell the ache in his back. Fatigue washed over him like warm
water, his vision blurring as he closed his eyes.

Against all logic and reason, though, he couldn’t sleep. Not all
at once, at any rate. He felt the light above him shift from time to time, felt
a new stiffness in his back or legs that told him he had drifted off, but only
for a short while. He wasn’t sure how long he’d lain there, listening to
Dargana’s slow breathing and feeling the exhaustion of almost three days hard
riding course through him, until suddenly both Dargana and the light were gone.

Chriani shot upright, wincing as he did. The platform was empty,
his eyes taking a moment to adjust to the green glow that filled it. The canopy
of leaves above was dark, a pale light coming instead from glyph lines scribed
along the outside edge of the floor. Though he had no idea how long he’d slept,
his head was strangely clear, the ache in his legs and back subsiding. And he
was ravenous. He ate the rest of the bread, distrusted the taste of the cheese
but ate that as well. He was working on his second flask of mead when he heard
movement at the ladder, looked over to see Dargana scramble up and over onto
the floor.

“You’re awake,” she said, and Chriani saw that she had changed.
The black armor she had refitted from her Brandishear-issue gear was gone,
replaced with a loose-fitting robe of dark blue. Her hair was shining and tied
back to a thick tail, the peak of her eyebrows and ears even more noticeable.
If she hadn’t spoken, Chriani might not have recognized her at first.

“It’s close to the time of the council,” she said. “Take the
ladder to the first platform below. There are baths there. Be quick, though.”

Chriani responded by drinking more slowly. Dargana noted it but
made no response as she sat down to eat. Chriani’s mind was clear enough to
sort through every question he wanted to ask her, everything he needed
answered. He kept his silence by instinct, though. Knowing somehow that it
wasn’t time for the questions yet.

When he was ready, he slipped down the ladder, swinging off it at
the first of the platforms below, vaguely remembered in passing from when they
had ascended earlier. A landing of dark wood dropped down along four steps that
turned around a tall screen of lacquered paper. Beyond the screen, the platform
was broader than the loft and open to the air around it, a gentle wind blowing.
Other screens surrounded a pair of commodes and two low pallets covered with
folded blankets, like some kind of healer’s table.

At the center of the space stood three oblong wooden tubs, each
filled with steaming-hot water that poured out from a brass globe set at its
head. Chriani saw no pipes to carry the water, no source of heat, no drain in
the tub. Just whatever magic was set into the globes, or perhaps the water
itself. Flowing endlessly, high above the ground.

A similar lack of plumbing was in evidence at the commode,
speaking to some magical function within it, and inspiring Chriani to make the
moonsign as he used it. He was fairly certain he’d never done that before.

Low shelves around the edge of the platform were stacked with
blankets and towels. Chriani took one of each as he warily stripped, leaving
leggings and smallclothes in a filthy heap on the floor behind him. He took his
belt with him. Not wearing it, but simply wanting to keep the things held in
its secret pockets close by as he slipped to the water.

He felt a delicious heat thread its way into tight muscles, let
his fingers work into the stress points on his legs, the knots in his
shoulders. There was no sign of soap or oil at the tub, but its water washed
the sweat and grime of the long road from him all the same. It had the scent of
spring rain and lilac. Chriani made the moonsign again, more than once.

Even as his body relaxed, though, he felt his mind drawn down
tight beneath the uncertainty that was the aftermath of the council of elders.
No idea what he had gotten caught up in. No idea how he was meant to get out.
His thoughts were clearer than they had been in long days, but that clarity
only let him see how hopelessly tangled those thoughts were. At his core now
was an emptiness he’d never felt before. As if everything he’d ever
been — everything he might ever be — had been drained
from him. He had disappeared from the world that once held him, like the power
of the black ring had somehow consumed him. All history, all possibility, gone.

When he stepped from the tub, his leggings and smallclothes had
disappeared from the floor where he’d left them. Chriani felt a spike of
tension as he let his senses slip out around him. No one there, no one
watching. Someone had come, though, and he hadn’t heard a thing. Just the wind
in the trees, blowing colder now with the heat of the bath still in him.

Hanging on a wooden rack where the clothes had been, he found
Ilvani garb. Undertunic and smallclothes in some manner of white linen, soft.
Leggings and tunic of a light, tight-knit wool, warm but airy as he pulled them
on. Boots of felt and leather, stitched in gold. A robe of green and black,
tied at the neck. Another tie for his hair, white cord, woven as tight Ilvani
knots. Both the robe and the tunic had the shoulder cut away, the war-mark
standing out like blood and shadow on Chriani’s skin.

A curved finger-knife and a steel mirror had been left with the
clothing. The water of the tub had left his beard unnaturally soft, the knife’s
razor edge cutting effortlessly as he trimmed and shaved. When he was done, he
slung his belt on, even though the Ilvani leggings had no need for it. Then he
tied his hair high, as he had never done before. Pulling it up and back,
trailing down his neck and exposing the slight peak of his ears. Not as sharp
or pronounced as the ears of the full Ilvani, but still something he had been
taught from the time he was a child to never show to the Ilmari world in which
he lived.

In the space of a single night, that world had become a thing he
had no reason to think of anymore.

When he slipped around the screen, Dargana was perched on the
landing and waiting for him. She stood as he approached. “It’s time.”

“Not quite,” Chriani said.

With her hair back, Dargana’s eyes seemed even darker than they
did when that hair framed her face. Her gaze tracked to Chriani’s own hair, his
ears revealed. She smiled. “I’m not the one to answer your questions,
half-blood.”

“You brought me here. You know why I was brought.”

“Yes,” Dargana said. “And no, I don’t. I was told to bring you
here and I brought you. That’s all.”

She swung onto the ladder, sliding down it in a way that made
Chriani’s stomach lurch. He thought of how far down the ground was if she
slipped.

“What did you tell him?” he called, too loudly. Dargana pulled
herself to a stop below him, looked around quickly as if watching for anyone
else who might have heard. It was silent around them, though. Just the whisper
of the wind through leaves and veiled walls.

“I told him nothing.” The exile said it in the Imperial tongue,
as if fearful of being overheard. Chriani’s thoughts had to shift to make sense
of her.

“Veassen knew…” Chriani started, but Dargana cut him off.

“Veassen told me. You following the princess. The Clearwater Way.
He told me how we found you near the scorpion sands, how the pale assassins
were following you. The bloodblade given to Uissa by Chanist’s hand before you
claimed it. He knew it all.”

Chriani was silent a moment. He heard the truth in the exile’s
tone, and something else. An unfamiliar fear. A sense that the blind seer was
as much an unknown to her as he was to Chriani.

“And what did he say it meant?”

“It meant that you were meant to be here.”

“My fate’s my own,” Chriani said darkly. “No one else calls it
for me.” But he heard the tremor in his voice as he said it, saw the thin edge
of a smile stray to Dargana’s lips.

“That night in Aerach,” she said. “When Kathlan and I followed
you to that wagon camp. Who was the Ilmari who knew you were riding there
before you did?”

Chriani felt a chill as the memory came back to him like
something from another lifetime. He heard Irdaign’s words as a whisper in his
mind.
Small gifts that tell me of things that might come to pass.
He
felt them shift into place alongside the echo of Veassen’s words, lurking deep
within his mind. Words Chriani had tried and failed to still.

I am one of fate’s chosen…

Dargana didn’t wait for his response as she continued her
descent.

Chriani followed her down past two side platforms, watching her
swing off the ladder at the third level below their quarters. It was a platform
they had passed on the previous climb, higher than the first council chamber.
Clambering off, he found her waiting. Two sentries in white lacquered ring mail
stood three paces behind her, backswords at their hips. They stepped aside for
the two of them, Dargana leading as they ascended a solid stair that arced out
from the platform and into open air.

Chriani had to focus to find his balance, keep his footing as he
stepped out into the empty night. He could see the half-full Clearmoon just
rising through the screen of trees, the ground dark below. Their footfalls were
all but silent as they went.

The platform wrapping around the limni that was their destination
was split into three terraced sections, wrapped with vines and screens of
silver cloth. A blue light filled the space, shining from a fountain that
bubbled on the middle terrace — a central spire like a spiked lance,
rising from a pool edged with smooth stone.

Dargana stepped aside as she reached the first terrace. Chriani
moved past her, seeing the Ilvani waiting. Twenty of them in total. He
recognized the speaker Laedda, who stood with Farenna a short distance behind
him. The Ilvani captain had his grey-black hair tied back, a sash across his
chest that left his war-mark visible. A backsword was at his belt, naked steel
with no scabbard holding it. Within the blade, a faint blue gleam spoke of some
dweomer in the steel.

At the farthest side of the third tier stood the tall warrior
with the golden braids from the previous council. The same dark fury she had
showed when arguing with Farenna was in her eyes. Other faces were vaguely
familiar to Chriani from that earlier council, but the inscrutable expressions
of the Ilvani were all but impossible to read where they watched him.